This post comes to us from the Market Leader blog:

Sure, it may sound trite, but it's nonetheless true: Agents have a love/hate relationship with the national real estate sites. ActiveRain is full of complaints from agents regarding the mistakes commonly found on the sites and about how chasing after these dead-end leads for their clients wastes precious time.

Love them or hate them, agents still need to deal with the national sites because, as one ActiveRain poster states, "You can spend all of the time and money you want on your own website but the big three are still going to get the major rankings."

Let's take a look at some pros and cons of working with "the big three."

Pros

Probably the biggest thing going for the national real estate sites is the fact that they rank at the top of most real estate-related Web searches. This means millions of real estate consumers visit these sites. That's a lot of eyeballs to have on your brand.

Since most people don't visit these sites unless they're actively looking at property, their audience is most assuredly focused on real estate – another mark in favor of national real estate websites.

Most of the sites allow agents to restrict their ads to be seen only by consumers searching in a certain geographic area.

Finally, there's the branding benefits that appearing on these sites provides. Whether agents like it or not, the big real estate sites lend agents credibility – and that's what helps win more clients.